Five years ago, the American comedy troupe 3Peat posted a sketch online that mischievously riffed on the villains’ tendency in slasher movies to bump off their black victims first. Titled The Blackening – a wink at the M Night Shyamalan thriller The Happening – it centred on a group of young African-American friends cornered by a crazed knifeman, who promises to spare them providing they let him kill “the blackest” member of the group.
One by one, the pals disavow their heritage and culture: one insists he can’t be that black because he’s also gay; another turns her Black Lives Matter t-shirt inside out before insisting that, actually, “all lives matter” – though it takes her three attempts to get the words out.
It was a brilliant idea, uproariously executed. So you can understand why – especially in the wake of Jordan Peele’s Get Out – Tim Story, the director of Barbershop and the Ride Along comedies, might decide there was a feature in it. A question, though: should the expanded version be a socially conscious satire, in the style of Peele’s multi-Oscar-nominated smash, or more of a straight spoof of old horror saws, like the Scary Movie franchise, albeit from a specifically black perspective? The finished product, co-written by 3Peat’s Dewayne Perkins and Girls Trip’s Tracy Oliver, ends up toggling between those two modes, with limited – though also sometimes highly amusing – success.
Here, The Blackening itself is a deadly board game: a sort of racist Trivial Pursuit, which a new group of friends discover at a plush holiday rental in the woods. Leering from the centre of the board is a plastic Jim Crow caricature, which croaks questions at the players, and threatens to kill them if and when they slip up. The first couple to arrive, Shawn (Jay Pharoah) and Morgan (Yvonne Orji), sceptically give it a try: soon enough, she’s trussed up the cellar while he’s bleeding out on the floor, a crossbow bolt in his neck.
Once their six companions show up – as well as Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), a squinting social leper none of them can quite recall inviting – the game is unearthed again, and the gang find themselves playing for Morgan’s life.
